


Chapel

by Hyb



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: 5x01, 5x02, Character Study, M/M, not alexandria compliant, twenty pounds of feelings in a ten pound bag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-27
Updated: 2015-03-27
Packaged: 2018-03-19 22:57:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3627438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/Hyb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rick's hands are nothing like God's. Narrow palms, long fingers, strength concealed. Rick can point him like a gun, like the lethal weight of his Python. An extension of one steady arm, Daryl spilling into being at his fingertip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chapel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thelongcon (rainer76)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/gifts).



> The result of binge watching this fucking show over two weeks. I am not okay. Then I tore through [thelongcon's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon/works) archive, all gorgeous and evocative and wrenching, and I had to write something or explode with feelings over these two assholes and their world. This is unasked for, but credit where credit is due for all the inspiration. Also a thousand thanks to my best friend for being my trusted critical eye.

 

 

1990 is fading out into a bleak freeze, but Merle is stumbling over burning sand an ocean away.

Seventh grade, and Daryl never took an art class. Doesn't much remember what classes he was supposed to be in, either. At lunch he would slink soft footed as a cat into the empty studio, the easels like naked winter trees overhead. Echoes rolled down the hall and past the crooked chairs, paint fumes rising, the earthy rightness of wet clay. 

The teacher wore silver bells around her ankle and he could always hear if she moved. She didn't say hello or goodbye, no prissy pinched mouth looking over his scraped knees, the ring of dirt under his nails. Some days she rolled an apple to the edge of her desk, some days a bittersweet grapefruit. Turned her eyes down until Daryl sidled up and snatched it. Rolled it in the bottom of his shirt to eat later, unseen, when the acid snarl of his stomach would ease. 

It was years before it drifted into his mind unbidden that the only black woman in hillbilly central had her own reasons for wanting to eat alone. It came hearing the whipcrack _n_ in his brother's mouth, like a foul taste Merle was flinging from his tongue.

There was a print on pasteboard wider than Daryl's outstretched arms. The teacher, name long forgotten, said it was a ceiling in Rome. Laughed and said it trapped a man for years. It looked like they were holding up the sky, the figures seated on columns like thrones. Daryl barely believed there were women at all, they were built like lumberjacks with breasts curving under robes of saffron and cornflower blue, muscles leaping in their bare white arms.

Here Adam and Eve creep shamefaced from the garden. Here two women bear a man's head on a platter, his mouth gaping slack and silent as a fish. Here an ark on a calm sea.

At the center was God creating man.

Daryl wrestled with the size of them both. He'd never seen the like, not up close. Adam stacked like a linebacker, unmarked thighs fallen wide where his dick ought to be. Waists dense with muscle instead of beer fat. Massive hands that could enfold your head like a football, slam your skull into a wall in a blink. 

God doesn't tense a fist. That gigantic hand curls loose, arching one finger with knuckles like marbles for Adam to meet; like any more might destroy the naked man where he reclines unguarded, chin lifted in wonder without fear. Daryl didn't think men could touch each other like that, carefully. Adam with his mountainous shoulders, his bull neck, and God reaches out like he spun man from glass.

A whole host of angels swarmed around God, bristling from his cloak like a fucking clown car. Daryl could never remember their shadowed faces. They might as well have been rubbed out, plastered over. There in the center of the universe only God and Adam were real, they only saw each other. Adam had balls like peanuts and God's robe didn't look any better than an old shirt gone pale with washing; still Daryl couldn't sneer. Not at the jutting boulder of a knee beneath, the corded thigh like a trunk.

 

 

 

When Daryl met Rick Grimes he saw one scrawny bastard hiding in a uniform like it still meant something. Maybe a hard bastard too, under all that lawman bullshit. Worn down to sinew, looking hungry like Daryl knew hungry. Then Merle was gone and Daryl spun dizzy, rudderless. Then the air caught fire, then the farm was ripped out from under them, then seven months of bad road and clawing for each day. 

Wasn't until the prison they could all count on going to sleep with full bellies and waking up to plenty more. Daryl's a damn good shot but just because he can feed himself doesn't mean he can do the same for ten people day after day.

Rick Grimes eats. Rests. Cleaves a man's skull with a machete. Snaps at his wife like a mongrel on a chain but he never raises a hand to her or his boy.

Rick fills out and Daryl has to touch him, find anchor in that resolute mass. Curl a hand over the heft of his shoulder in passing, drag across the unyielding width of his belly. Daryl touches to be transformed but it doesn't work that way, does it, Adam didn't make himself and there's no Bible verse he knows about rubbing up on widowers like a needy cat.

It takes Rick curling a knuckle under Daryl's swelling eye, sunk down in the dirt, his beard still sodden dark with Joe's blood. Daryl just watched his good cop spit a man's jugular away like gristle, and he's heavy with peace in place of fear. Rick could end worlds in his rage but he doesn't hurt his people.

Daryl will walk, run, kill where Rick aims him. Follow his beckoning arm outstretched against the sky. Follow him past the horizon, off the face of the earth. They won't fall, because Daryl won't allow it. Won't ever let Rick slip out of reach. 

 

 

 

So Daryl doesn't prepare himself, in Terminus. Offers up no bullshit prayers to a maker either cruel or imagined. He's just found Rick again, just scraped solid ground beneath his feet. The Termite fuckers were too stupid to live. They let in a grizzly like Rick, a panther like Michonne, a mean slit-eyed coyote like Daryl, and thought they'd survive. 

 

 

 

They sleep in a church. Get the surface grime scrubbed off. Daryl checks his bolts by candlelight, takes stock of his own hands. The Claimers stomped his left. Screams up his arm to move but yeah, he can move just fine. Too long living outdoors, no fucking Vaseline to limber up his cracked hands. His nail beds are splitting hard at the corners, raw red fissures that won't heal, skin swollen hot and thin. Like Daryl's coming apart at the seams, popping claw until he's flayed into a new kind of animal.

His father is indistinct in recollection, squat as a tank and mean as a hornet, fat knuckles and nicotine stains. Merle eclipsed him years ago, filled up his little brother's ugly hollow places with snarling defiance. Merle curled his lip like a promise when he was about to slug you, he didn't come up behind with a lamp or a tire iron, he never broke a chair on Daryl's back and made him fix it the next day. Merle and his sledgehammer fist – he was all Daryl had in the world, his only landmark, until he wasn't.

Rick's hands are nothing like God's. Narrow palms, long fingers, strength concealed. Rick can point him like a gun, like the lethal weight of his Python. An extension of one steady arm, Daryl spilling into being at his fingertip.

Their bloody lawman, avenging angel, swinging his flaming sword of wrath and righteousness. He pads down the velvet hush of the aisle and counts the sleepers. An open hand hovers over Lil Asskicker tucked close to her brother, flaxen hair curling at her crown like a painted halo. Rick lifts his head, snags on the flash of watching eyes like a hook. Daryl telegraphs loud, insistent in the tilt of his neck, the narrow heat of his stare. Turns soundless on a heel and Rick follows him past the dry and bloodless office, rolling heat like a tailpipe at his back.

The church breathes, and Rick unmakes him. Moonlight spills silver over them both, a slit of a window like a helmet's visor above, shadow pooling black at the hollows of Rick's throat. The store room rustles with stale altar cloths white as ghosts. He skates his palms under Rick's shirt. Clutches ribs like bellows. Thumbs a nipple to feel it snap tight, to hear Rick's startled huff against his ear. Even better when he tugs Rick down by his beard, even white teeth snapping for his fingertips.

On the floor, pants shoved down to trap his knees. Daryl's been broken before, shuffled his pieces back together into something stronger, but Rick doesn't have to destroy to create. No haven in the world safer than here, Rick pinning his wrists over his head, one graceful hand splaying over his belly. No force in it, only resolution, the careful shape of his name on Rick's tongue. Daryl is unafraid sure as he strains his thighs wide for the hard curl of Rick's palm on his cock, the snap of his wrist. The breath Rick sighs into his mouth is life and Daryl is whole, beheld. Rick ruts a scalding streak up his hip, anoints him. It's the only blessing that matters.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you feel so moved, share your thoughts or find me on [tumblr](http://h-yb.tumblr.com/)


End file.
